Rants Tagged with “Music”
1 (Total Pages: 1/Total Results: 5)
I've just gone done buying some music on Amazon's new AmasonMP3 service and I have to say I love it. Here are some pros and cons:
Pros:
- Download DRM-less MP3's
- All top 100 Albums are $8.99 each!
- They aren't trying to replace my media player (unlike iTunes)
- Their downloader is tiny and only used to facilitate downloading files and will even drop the files in Windows Media Player if you want (I didn't).
- Album art (and all metadata) already in the ID4 tags!
Cons:
- No simple url to the site (like www.amazon.com/mp3 which takes you to a search for mp3 players). Must go to the main site and find the link. Annoying.
- No encoding choices. Everything is encoded as 256 CBR. It sounds great but it will annoy audio-philes.
- Its been reported that the MP3 files are watermarked to indicate they are from Amazon, but no personal information is stamped to the files, so I can live with this.
As they are competing with Apple and others, the decision to use DRM-less MP3 (instead of the DRM-less Apple format files that would need to be converted) and not to embed them with personal information (again, unlike iTunes) should be a boon to their bottom line. I love it...
My favorite music store for independent music (CD Baby) is now supporting downloads. What makes that even cooler is that the downloads are MP3 (
without any DRM). Way to go to not make me wait a week to get a new act!
You might want to mute the sound, but the visuals are impressive and inventive...
Bare Naked Ladies are selling their new album in MP3 and FLAC on their website. If you want their new album and want to put it to the man at the same time...check it out!
I just don't get it. Sure the UI is the best in class for the Harddrive MP3 players, but $249 for an IPod with *less* storage (4 Gig instead of 10, 15 or 30). I spend a majority of my time with my MP3 player, playing music, not diddling with the controls. I spent $249 for my player, a Creative Zen, and got 30 Gigs (yeah 30). Its a tad bigger than the regular IPod, but I don't think the smaller size would make me happier. Is anyone really excited about the smaller IPod?
